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Black Hole as Extreme Particle Accelerator

Life of the jet set. This simulation follows along in a “co-moving” reference frame with a fixed set of particles as they are blasted out of an active galactic nucleus (AGN). The magnetic field lines they experience change as they move from a smoother region (left) to a region with a kink instability (right). [Credit: E. P. Alves et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. (2018)]

E. Paulo Alves, Jonathan Zrake, Frederico Fiuza
Relativistic magnetized jets from active galaxies are among the most powerful cosmic accelerators, but their particle acceleration mechanisms remain a mystery. We present a new acceleration mechanism associated with the development of the helical kink instability in relativistic jets, which leads to the efficient conversion of the jet’s magnetic energy into nonthermal particles. Large-scale three-dimensional ab initio simulations reveal that the formation of highly tangled magnetic fields and a large-scale inductive electric field throughout the kink-unstable region promotes rapid energization of the particles. The energy distribution of the accelerated particles develops a well-defined power-law tail extending to the radiation-reaction limited energy in the case of leptons, and to the confinement energy of the jet in the case of ions. When applied to the conditions of well-studied bright knots in jets from active galaxies, this mechanism can account for the spectrum of synchrotron and inverse Compton radiating particles, and offers a viable means of accelerating ultra-high-energy cosmic rays to 1020 eV.